Topological Approach to Microcanonical Thermodynamics and Phase Transition of Interacting Classical Spins

We propose a topological approach suitable to establish a connection between thermodynamics and topology in the microcanonical ensemble. Indeed, we report on results that point to the possibility of describing interacting classical spin systems in the thermodynamic limit, including the occurrence of a phase transition, using topological arguments only. Our approach relies on Morse theory, through the determination of the critical points of the potential energy, which is the proper Morse function. Our main finding is that, in the context of the classical models studied, the Euler characteristic $\chi(E)$ embeds the necessary features for a correct description of several magnetic thermodynamic quantities of the systems, such as the magnetization, correlation function, susceptibility, and critical temperature. Despite the classical nature of the models, such quantities are those that do not violate the laws of thermodynamics (with the proviso that van der Waals loop states are mean field (MF) artifacts). We also discuss the subtle connection between our approach using the Euler entropy, defined by the logarithm of the modulus of $\chi(E)$ per site, and that using the Boltzmann microcanonical entropy. Moreover, the results suggest that the loss of regularity in the Morse function is associated with the occurrence of unstable and metastable thermodynamic solutions in the MF case. The reliability of our approach is tested in two exactly soluble systems: the infinite-range and the one-dimensional short-range XY models in the presence of a magnetic field. In particular, we confirm that the topological hypothesis holds for both the infinite-range ($Tc \not= 0$) and the short-range (Tc  =  0) XY models. Further studies are very desirable in order to clarify the extension of the validity of our proposal.